Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town

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Holy cow is this game deep. And involving. And addictive.

By Craig Harris

With the dozens of games releasing within the months of November and December, it would have to take a very special game to draw my attention away for an entire weekend of non-stop gaming. Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town is that game. The game made a decent splash on the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, but no handheld version is as deep as what Natsume has put into the Game Boy Advance version...so much that it will absolutely suck every precious spare minute of your life if you're not careful. And that is exactly the game's intention: to give you a life away from your life. It's more a game of economics with a farm as a setting, but it's completely engrossing and tough to put down...especially when you start uncovering all the nuances to the gameplay.

Features

Dozens (if not hundreds) of hours of gameplay

More than a half dozen mini-games

Future GameCube connectivity

Cartridge save (two slots)

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town begins as simple as it looks: you've just inherited a farm from an old man who passed away months ago. He had no real family or friends, but enjoyed the short time spent on his farm in your childhood. With no prior obligations in your life, it's time to start a new one in Mineral Town. The old man left all the necessary equipment to get the farm going, but it's going to take a lot of hard work to get the farm in working condition. The task is to, of course, get the farm up and running and maintain it enough to generate enough cashflow. Naturally, you'll have to spend money to make money, and that comes in the form of buying cows for milk, sheep for wool, and chickens for eggs, additional income to provide more money for chicken feed and animal fodder, medicine for the sick, and upgrades to the barn, chicken coop, and house that will enable more generated income. All of this will help in shooting for that ultimate dream: a cottage in town, a beautiful wife, and a healthy child.

The game is essentially a well-designed, incredibly involving test to see how well you can manage resources. The game does start out slowly, with a packet of seeds and a weed, stone, and stick covered field masquerading as a farm. Much of the early days are dedicated to truly hard work, cleaning up the area and removing all the brush in order to make the farm a lot more habitable for the crops to grow. One packet of seed is enough to generate enough income for more seeds, eventually enough for a chicken or cow. The strategy is, of course, how to use the money that you've earned to the best of your farm's abilities.

The only enemy in Harvest Moon is the clock itself, and a day in Mineral Town lasts about ten minutes. It's actually a tough time to gauge since the clock only rolls in outside environments; if you're more affectionate to the animals or a heavy miner, the clock doesn't move at all. On the farm, though, the time ticks away at a rate of 5 seconds for every 10 minutes of game time. So, it's a challenge to "Beat the Clock" when out tilling the fields, planting the seeds, watering the ground, and harvesting the crops, a cycle that's neverending if you're good enough. A season lasts for thirty game days, of which the seasons change and the current crop withers, which then requires you to clean up the dead plants and replace them with seasonal vegetables...the sooner you get them going, the faster the income's generated. But for every action comes an obvious reaction: fatigue. You're only human, and hard work will seriously take its toll...which means that you'll have to spend a significant time in the hot springs to bring your energy level back up. Later on you'll discover elements which will increase strength and energy, as well as farming ability (levelling up farm equipment is an absolute must), but in the early days it's a fight to get the farm going.

There's so much to do in the game that it would be insane to expect one person to handle all the farming tasks. Thankfully there are these friendly elfish sprites that will jump at the chance to do chores for you...but you'll have to befriend them first with gifts that they like. So, not only do you have to manage "employees," you'll have to make sure they like you enough to keep working for "the man." These little guys are an extremely important element to explore since your hard working will inevitably cause you to neglect one of the goals in the game: to woo a girlfriend. There are four different girls in the game that you can latch onto and smother with affection, each one's affection level for you represented by a heart icon throbbing on her on-screen representation. It's a slow process to get a gal to actually take a liking to you, and players could spend several seasons attempting this goal. There is competition, though, since there's an in-town match for each of these girls...and you'll have to act quickly in order to get their girl of choice to go with you instead of the canned in-game choice.